CEO Message

As important as it is, the nitty gritty of developing new drugs is sometimes just plain hard work. The great scientific headlines, promising and efficacious results, strong clinical trial data are all under-pinned by great people doing great, hard work day-after-day.

As a leader in a young or old biotech, it’s hard to do it all well. These professionals need to assemble teams and give them all the resources to succeed: team members, capital, facilities and — above all — time.

I joined Explora because Drs. Lin and Xin assembled a combination of services to ease two of these burdens for researchers: vivarium management and rodent research studies. The vivarium management and CRO solutions across seven (7) facilities in San Diego and San Francisco gives biotech leaders a new set of options:

Time: A biotech can start using Explora’s AAALAC accredited OnDemand vivarium (rented) rooms tomorrow and have mice or rats on study within days. Our OnSite team members are hired to manage others’ vivaria with little notice to allow you to focus on your science instead of changing cages. Finally, Explora’s preclinical CRO team of scientists can start your study on unusually quick turn-around timetables;

Flexibility: Ramping up and down operations and nimbly adjusting study programs is crucial as a biotechs respond to scientific results;

Capital Efficiency: Venture capital is too expensive to put into $350/square foot capital improvements and build small-scale vivaria. It takes time to permit and build this kind of space, never mind staff it properly. It is a much better use of funds to rent what you need when you need it;

Quality: Small (and large) vivaria are difficult to staff and run well in a manner that enables repeatable scientific results. A certain scale is required to build knowledge, protocols and important certifications (such as AALAC, OLAW) backed by experience technical staff available 24 hours and 365 days. Explora has 50+ customers across seven (7) sites enjoying the benefits of Explora’s deep infrastructure located proximate to key biotech talent hubs;

Sustainability: The “back of the house” in a traditional vivaria is an energy, water and square footage-intensive operation when cages must be washed, cleaned and sterilized. Disposable caging (Explora uses Innovive) is changing the calculus in vivaria opertions across facilities large and small where energy, water and space usage matters.

I do not have the personal ability to perform the science to save lives or cure cancer. I am not a researcher. But it is deeply important to me to contribute to this effort in some meaningful, material way. I consider myself to be amongst the luckiest of people — I get work with the fantastic Explora team as we make these services available to the biotech community on a wider and wider scale.